Monday, March 22, 2010

This Tops It All

Barely eight hours have passed since the democrats passed a historic bill allowing most Americans the right to receive medical care free of the daunting rules and restrictions long established by the private insurance companies of America. Just to briefly give one example, insurance companies can and do reject people all the time for medical coverage on the flimsiest of excuses on the basis that illnesses are pre-existing. People pay thousands of dollars of insurance premiums only to find out that their claims for protection in an individual situation are rejected by an unknown person sitting somewhere at a desk in Kansas, or Missouri, without any medical training whatsoever making some life or death decision denying coverage on one pretext or another.

Let me digress briefly and talk about a trip to Dallas I made back in 1967 to undergo two weeks training for my new job as a pharmaceutical representative for a major drug company. Just across the street from the motel where the training class was staying was a Laundromat. There were two entrances to that Laundromat as well as two different sets of washing and drying machines.; One was for white people and one was for “colored” only. As a young idealist from southeast Michigan, I came from an area where there was no similar overt form of racism so I was fascinated by this raw display. However, I was not naïve enough to realize and understood that people from my neck of the woods manifested a variety of covert racial attitudes and activities that were as significant in their owns ways.

This southern experience flashed back into mind this morning as I surveyed the mainstream Republican reaction to the passage of the health bill In the background of the Palin “death panels,” type claims, the mainstream Republican thinker, Newt Gingrich, commented on the potential significance of the health care passage. If Democrats pass health reform, Gingrich said, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.

So there you have it President Obama, you mad man. You have destroyed all that is good about America, just like your predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. By bringing 30 million people in from the dark side of medical care, you have destroyed the Republican interpretation of “all men are created equal,” just as Johnson did and shattered the Democrats. We will never recover from this destruction and the worst part of it, we may have to suffer the consequences of living another ten or fifteen years longer than we would have. Shame, shame.